I should like to begin tonight’s lecture with a short description of spiritual reality and contrast it with the picture humanity represents when viewed from a higher vantage point. This perspective has a bearing on the topic we shall discuss.

In reality, the universe is wide open, and all human beings can move freely in it. The universe is truly at your disposal, with its infinitely rich variety of experience, fulfillment and energy. You can make use of all this. You can truly explore the blissful possibilities open to you. You can indeed be master of this wonderful world in which you forever expand into more blissful experience, into greater wisdom and power, into wider scopes and depths of being. However, due to a number of circumstances, you simply do not realize this fact. You assume that you are bound and imprisoned in a limited world, where you are fenced in by boundaries you cannot penetrate or control. In this assumption of a limited universe, you make no use of the universal powers within you, destined for your pleasure and expansion, for your growth and experience. Not making use of these forces, you inactivate yourself and thus create imaginary fences that need not exist at all.

Imagine wide open spaces, containing all the beauty of the world, all that an individual could possibly require for his or her enjoyment. But people do not see these wide open spaces. They do not see the powers, forces, assets, beauties surrounding them. They close their eyes in fear and believe they live behind fenced-in walls. Although there is no prison, and there are no fences in reality, if you believe and act as though you cannot move from the spot, the effect will be the same. You may wait a long time to be delivered from this helpless, passive position, but as long as you do not discover that all you have to do is recognize your freedom, you will remain fenced in. This is the relationship between reality and illusion. Illusion appears real, but only as long as you believe in it.

The fences could be instantly removed, with one gesture. But because you don’t know this, you must find your own way to discovering the nonexistence of the fences. There is no other possibility. Others can tell you that this is so, and you may even believe what you hear: that you could open your eyes and start moving out, using your inborn faculties. Yet, you are afraid to try. You may listen, but dare not do what is necessary to move out into the great and safe freedom. You fear the freedom and, rather, choose unnecessary suffering. But one day you discover to your astonishment the ease of reality: its generosity, its abundance, its stimulating peace, and you wonder why you had feared it, why you rather chose self-inflicted prohibitions.

The fences are rarely just simple constructs. They are mazes, complicated labyrinths — products of your false assumptions and the contradictory attitudes you collect. It is your job on earth to find the way out of these labyrinthine byways to the freedom and liberation this path promises.

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